1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to document managing systems, and more particularly to a document managing system which has a plurality of independent document managing apparatuses. The present invention also relates to a document managing apparatus and a document managing method employed by the document managing system.
2. Description of the Related Art
A document managing apparatus formed by a server or the like that is provided in a network, records document management information such as bibliographical information. The document management information includes, in addition to an identification (ID) of each document, user IDs (UIDs) of creators, readers, editors and the like. For example, the UID is used to manage rights to access the documents.
In relatively large organizations such as corporations, there often exist a plurality of independent document managing apparatuses.
FIG. 1 is a diagram showing a structure of an example of a conventional document managing system. The document management apparatus 100 shown in FIG. 1 has a UID managing part 101 for managing UIDs, a document managing part 102 for managing documents, a document database (DB) 103 forming a storage for storing the documents, and an access control list (ACL) table 104 that records access right information related to access rights to the documents. A document managing apparatus 200 has a structure similar to that of the document managing apparatus 100, and has an UID managing part 201, a document managing part 202, a document DB 203, and an ACL table 204.
For example, if a user wishes to access a target document that is stored in the document DB 103 of the document managing apparatus 100 in FIG. 1, the document managing part 102 acquires the UID of the user who is authenticated by the UID managing part 101, with respect to the target document that is retrieved from the document DB 103 according to the document ID, and refers to the access right information of the target document by referring to the ACL table 104, and permits access to the user within the range permitted for this user.
On the other hand, a Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 2004-70416 proposes a technique for providing services to a user in a network system employing a plurality of authentication systems, by authenticating a user who is registered for one or a plurality of authentication systems of the network system as the user of a target service.
In the document managing system shown in FIG. 1 having the plurality of independent document managing apparatuses, there are cases where it becomes necessary to distribute, move or integrate a portion or all of the documents managing in one document managing apparatus 100 to the other document managing apparatus 200, for example. In such cases, the target document is distributed from the document managing apparatus 100 as export data D1 to the document managing apparatus 200, and the document managing apparatus 200 accepts the target document as import data D2.
However, The UIDs in the document managing apparatus 100 are managed by the UID managing part 101, and the UIDs in the document managing apparatus 200 are managed by the UID managing part 201, and the UIDs are defined independently for each document managing apparatus. For this reason, when the user who is permitted to access the target document in the document managing apparatus 100 wishes to access the same target document in the document managing apparatus 200, a situation may occur where the user is not be permitted access the target document in the document managing apparatus 200 even though the same user is making access to the same target document.
If this situation occurs, it becomes necessary to reassign the access right to the target document in the document managing apparatus 200. But when a large number of documents are distributed, moved or integrated between the document managing apparatuses 100 and 200, the reassignment of the access rights to the documents becomes an extremely troublesome and complex operation, and there was a problem in that the load on a manager who manages the access rights to the documents will become considerably large.